The People, No

by Frank, Thomas

  In the case of the economics profession, its mass shaming by the Depression proved to be a supremely fortunate development. In 1932, “respectable opinion was all on Mr. Hoover’s side,” the economist John Kenneth Galbraith wrote years later. The ones who thought America should detach itself from the gold standard, bail out agriculture, and spend lots of money on public works were “cranks, crackpots, eccentrics, and the vaguely irresponsible.… These were not the ideas of men of established reputation,” Galbraith concludes. “If Roosevelt had mastered and accepted the ideas of the men of established reputation, his views would not have been different from those of Mr. Hoover.” 29

  Thank goodness Roosevelt didn’t care about “established reputation.” Thank goodness he was willing to put the well-being of ordinary people above economic orthodoxy. Yes, professionals eventually learned to honor FDR as the patron saint of academia-in-government, since he was advised by a so-called Brain Trust of college professors. However, FDR took their advice not because he was a meritocrat who automatically deferred to orthodoxy, but because he was a pragmatist who wanted to try new approaches to things. In fact, FDR was decidedly unimpressed by academic prestige. At a press conference in 1935, the president recounted reading articles by fifteen different economists. From these, he concluded, “two things stand out: The first is that no two of them agree, and the other thing is that they are so foggy in what they say that it is almost impossible to figure out what they mean. It is jargon; absolute jargon.”

  Indeed, one of the idiosyncratic ideas Roosevelt aired a number of times during his presidency was that highly educated people were a “class” enjoying “privilege” every bit as much as those of great wealth. He saw these two groups—the rich and the well-educated—as distinct elites, albeit on the same side of most questions. If you legislated as degree-holders demanded, he once said, you would be helping not the “whole community” but their particular social cohort. FDR liked to repeat the following homily, which he attributed to Harvard president Charles William Eliot: “If the ballot of the United States were limited to the holders of college degrees”—not a far-fetched proposal in our current springtime of seething anti-populism—“the country would probably last about two years.” 30

  Putting the well-being of the “whole community” above norms, prestige, and academic orthodoxy doesn’t sound scary to me; it sounds like good government. It’s an attitude that had a salutary effect on the ivory tower as well. In 1938 a group of young academic economists published a book repudiating their conservative elders and endorsing FDR’s New Deal in its broad populist outlines. “The conception of government as the organized expression of the collective strength and aspirations of the great mass of the people,” they wrote, “has come to stay.” 31 Not a ringing declaration really, but still quite remarkable in the context of the economics profession, which had previously insisted—and which would someday insist again—that the hopes of the “great mass of the people” didn’t matter; that the only ruler that government needed to heed was economic law.

  * * *

  ON THE OTHER hand, we have been instructed in recent years to understand that when we hear someone dedicating themselves to the “great mass of the people” or to the “whole community” or to the “common man,” they are always, perversely, leaving somebody out. Specifically, we know that they are secretly confessing themselves to be guided by racism, or xenophobia, or nativism, or anti-pluralism.

  And sure enough, there were plenty of high-profile racists and anti-Semites in the 1930s, and a few of them liked to talk about “the people”—for example, Father Coughlin, the Jew-hating radio priest, or Democratic senator Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi, the country’s champion bigot.

  But by 1936, Bilbo’s Democratic Party—the traditional enforcer of the racist system in the South—had begun to change. In that year, the party commenced its historic outreach to black voters in the North. This effort was assigned to a Democratic group called the Good Neighbor League, set up for the purpose of persuading African Americans and other traditionally Republican groups to join Roosevelt’s liberal coalition. The high point of the effort was a spectacular rally in Madison Square Garden featuring Cab Calloway and his orchestra; it was broadcast across the country—except in the South, that is. The League’s political message was simple: look at what the New Deal agencies had done for African Americans. Let’s allow one of the scholars who has studied the episode to recite the list. The federal government, he recalls,

  had employed 25,000 young black men and women in the National Youth Administration, and 200,000 blacks had been enlisted in the Civilian Conservation Corps. The Works Progress Administration provided earnings for 1,000,000 black families.… In addition to these accomplishments, nineteen housing projects for black residents were undertaken by the Public Works Administration, and $7,500,000.00 was appropriated for black schools and colleges in fifteen southern states. 32

  As countless writers have pointed out over the years, the New Deal failed African Americans in all sorts of ways. The great reforms of the 1930s coexisted with Jim Crow and were sometimes crafted specifically to exclude black workers from benefits, thus tiptoeing around the ever-so-delicate sensibilities of the white South. New Deal housing agencies refused to subsidize black homeownership, a costly mistake with consequences that are still felt today. It was not until 1948 that the Democratic Party truly committed itself to civil rights; it was not until the 1950s that Social Security was finally expanded to cover almost everyone. Still, what FDR achieved was impressive when compared to the pittance Hoover had done during his rounds with the Depression. Accordingly, the Democrats’ outreach in 1936 was a massive success, with black neighborhoods in northern cities going overwhelmingly for FDR that year.

  Viewed from a wider perspective, the populist culture of the thirties—always deliberately inclusive and glaringly anti-racist—permanently changed how Americans think of themselves. The historian Michael Denning calls it “pan-ethnic Americanism,” a “pride in ethnic heritage and identity combined with an assertive Americanism.” It was, he continues, “perhaps the most powerful working-class ideology of the age of the CIO, and it significantly reshaped the contours of official U.S. nationalism.” 33

  Examples: Louis Adamic, a writer on class conflict in America who moved on to eulogizing the immigrant experience in books such as From Many Lands and A Nation of Nations . And: All the social-realist murals of the era, with their obligatory scenes of proletarian heroism and their representations of humanity in all its multihued righteousness. Even: the multicultural American propaganda during World War II, which was supposedly about smashing the Nazi idea of a “master race” in the name of “all free peoples” everywhere, and which has been remembered ever since for the flagrant way we disregarded it, interning people of Japanese descent, rescuing the British and French empires, and so on. *

  Or think of Ballad for Americans , the 1939 cantata made into a gigantic popular hit by the African American singer Paul Robeson. It’s OK, nobody else remembers it, either. Still, it was a sensation when it was first broadcast, the granddaddy of all the schmaltzy July 4 patriotic entertainment from that time to this. The song is a ten-minute rendering of the country’s history with Robeson singing the part of the people. In political-science terms, his populism is clinically exact: “I represent the whole,” he announces at one point, quoting Lincoln, hailing the Founding Fathers, singing the first lines of the Declaration of Independence. The elites are, of course, the bad guys: the “everybody who’s anybody” who have persistently doubted democracy. Robeson, conversely, declares himself the “everybody who’s nobody,” the “nobody who’s everybody.” And then Robeson recites a series of lists—occupations, religions, and nationalities. Ballad for Americans is basically pluralism set to music:

  I’m just an Irish, Negro, Jewish, Italian, / French and English, Spanish, Russian, / Chinese, Polish, Scotch, Hungarian, / Litvak, Swedish, Finnish, Canadian, / Greek and Turk and Czech / and do
uble-check American.

  Just as in Citizen Kane and Meet John Doe , the deep baritone voice of “the whole” then takes a slap at demagoguery and racism—“out of the cheating, out of the shouting / out of the murders and lynching / out of the windbags, the patriotic spouting.”

  One reason Robeson’s multiculturalism made as much sense as it did in 1939 was because immigrants and children of immigrants were everywhere in Depression-era populist culture. Frank Capra, the great votary of the small-town myth, was born in Italy. Floyd Olson, the radical Minnesota governor, was the son of Scandinavian immigrants; so was the poet Carl Sandburg. Sidney Hillman, one of the most creative labor leaders of the period, was born in Lithuania. The proletarian parable that all these people embraced was, to a surprising degree, a polyglot populism of the recent arrival. The CIO, the voice of mass working-class mobilization, was particularly fond of it; you might even say populist multiculturalism was their house style. 34

  I have in mind here a pamphlet produced by the CIO’s political action committee called The People’s Program for 1944 . It is filled with typical pop-talk of the World War II variety, making shout-outs to farmers and small business owners and dreaming of a plan for universal prosperity after the war. (“Ultimate victory, of which we are certain,” the pamphlet trumpeted, “must bring with it the assurance of lasting peace … and the development of an abundant life for the Common Man of this earth.”) Then the pamphlet comes to civil rights. “The hateful practice of discrimination because of race, religion or national origin against which we are fighting abroad must be stamped out at home,” it declared.

  Anti-Semitic and anti-Negro practices undermine the very foundation of our democracy. Full economic, political, and civil equality must be guaranteed to every American, regardless of his race, creed or national origin. 35

  Again, this was not unusual; it was what populist unionism was all about. We were all part of “the people”; we were all together in the war against fascism and reactionary elites. This was the message of another CIO pamphlet, The Negro in 1944 , which trumpeted advances made under the Roosevelt presidency.

  In this year of decision, 1944, Negro Americans find themselves at a crossroad.

  They are not there alone.

  The small farmer, the small businessman, the white collar worker, the professional, the housewife, both white and colored, are there.

  The foreign-born are there.

  So are all the people who live by the sweat of their brows.

  All the “little people” are at the crossroad this year. 36

  Let us conclude this section by recalling an amazing War Bonds advertisement denouncing bigotry that ran in labor newsletters in 1944 and was uncovered by the historian Gary Gerstle. The ad accused a woman who worked hard to support the troops of undermining the war effort. How so? She had failed America, as Gerstle describes it,

  by making “thoughtless remarks” about neighbors “who go to a different church,” and “about folks whose skin is a different color, or whose names are hard to pronounce.” “As surely as though you landed on these shores in the dark of night from a submarine, bent on blowing up factories and burning bridges,” the advertisement charged this witless mother, “in spite of your charming manner and your ‘all-out’ war record, lady, you are a saboteur.” 37

  * * *

  THE GRANDEST, MOST eloquent evocation of Depression-era populism came from the Lincoln biographer Carl Sandburg, whose 1936 offering was a book-length poem called The People, Yes . Aside from its iconic title, the work is almost completely forgotten today, a strange outlier amidst the last century’s highbrow taste in poetry. Sandburg’s verse is not abstract; it is not avant-garde. But let us put our cynicism aside for a moment. As the title suggests, The People, Yes was a full-throated celebration of ordinariness: the manners of the people, their dreams, their folly, their aspirations, and above all their speech, the “plain and irregular sounds and echoes from / the roar and whirl of street crowds, work gangs, sidewalk clamor,” as he wrote in the introduction.

  As with Ballad for Americans and so many other works of the time, there is a compulsive listing of identities, repeated efforts to name-check everyone. Sandburg gives us cantos that are lists of occupations, cantos made up of slang expressions and lines from folktales and popular jokes. There are strikers, angry farmers, tricksters, soldiers, armies, and, of course, a big fat rich guy, ordering others off his property.

  Naturally Sandburg attacks the elite, mocking the pretenses of aristocracy and reminding his Depression-era audience of something they knew all too well—that justice treats rich and poor differently. He reminds us that bank robbers go to prison but, if you’re a bank officer who loots the company, “all you have to do is start another bank.”

  Sandburg may have been the perfect embodiment of the populist sensibility of the Depression years. He was known as the “People’s Poet,” the heir of Walt Whitman, the bard of the ordinary, “writing his raw, muscular verse for his peers out of a spontaneous native wisdom,” as his biographer put it. 38 Over the course of his remarkable career he organized for the Socialist Party, wrote groundbreaking newspaper stories about the black experience in Chicago, and collected folk songs.

  The virtuosity of the ordinary was Sandburg’s lifelong fascination. This ultra-democratic theme was unpopular with highbrow critics at the time, as it is again today: what we expect from our poets is abstruseness, exclusivity, peer-reviewed professional excellence. Sandburg’s modernism carried him to a different place, where the vernacular of the everyday was made to describe the nobility of the average.

  * * *

  WHAT I HAVE offered in this chapter is, again, not an ambitious new theory about the past. Everything I’ve recounted here has been a deliberately noncontroversial summary of famous quotes and events. My purpose in bringing it all together in one place is to point out in the bluntest way possible that populism is not at all what modern anti-populist theory holds it to be … and to suggest, furthermore, that populism may well be the key to turning our nation around.

  I make no claim that the New Deal ushered in utopia or even that it practiced what it preached. It didn’t, as everyone knows. Regardless of how Paul Robeson stirred his listeners’ souls, there were hotels and restaurants all across the country that could lawfully have refused him service. And while the CIO represented democratic aspiration of the best kind, it came a cropper in the South just as Populism did, a shortcoming for which middle-class Americans everywhere eventually paid the price.

  Even so, it is vitally important to remember the words and the deeds of those days. The years when American liberals laughed at “economic laws,” sent the “money changers” packing, and declared “the people are what matter” were also the years of peak liberal greatness. Populism’s days of cultural ascendancy in this country coincided with the gradual conquest of economic depression and with America’s victory in World War II. Populism is what strengthened the unions and built a middle-class democracy. Populism, rightly understood, is what allowed Roosevelt to win four presidential elections (and Harry Truman a fifth); it is what gave Democrats such a solid majority in the House of Representatives that they didn’t lose it, except for two brief interregnums, until 1994.

  American liberals need to remember how their tradition thought and how it talked when it was strong and vital—in order to figure out how it might do so again.

  4

  “The Upheaval of the Unfit”

  Not everyone loved the common man in the Age of Roosevelt. For all the tears that liberals shed over Dust Bowl migrants, the Depression also saw a powerful backlash against democracy in general and against economic democracy in particular. The decade that produced “The People, Yes” also gave us The Revolt of the Masses, in which Jose Ortega y Gasset deplored the empowerment of the vulgar herd, and also The Hour of Decision, in which Oswald Spengler defined democracy as mob rule and bad taste, a system so weak that it could never last.

  Looking bac
k on the decade of the thirties, it is easy to forget how many people around the world decided in those years that democracy was finished—that the global economic depression had revealed government by the people to be a failure. Democratic governments everywhere dithered and crumbled, their glad-handing politicians useless in the face of the crisis.

  Americans lost faith as well. At the end of his landmark three-volume history of this period, the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. assembled a series of shocking quotes from prominent Americans in the early thirties, all of whom were convinced that democracy was either doomed or that it deserved to die. A sampling:

  “The moral and intellectual bankruptcy of liberalism in our time needs no demonstration. It is as obvious as rain and as taken for granted.”

  “Political democracy is moribund.… Civil liberties like democracy are useful only as tools for social change. Political democracy as such a tool is obviously bankrupt throughout the world.”

  “Modern Western civilization is a failure. That theory is now generally accepted.” 1

  These were fairly extreme statements. But pessimism about the future of democracy was common during the Depression, talking at you from the radio or the pulpit, scolding you from the editorial page. The form it ultimately took was what I have been calling anti-populism.

  The problem, the anti-populists maintained, was excessive democracy. Just as in 1896, the right order of things was menaced by mob action, by a rising up of the ignorant. Government by the people had become a threat to property, to the Constitution, and hence to democracy itself.